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“They found death panels in the health bill when they weren’t there and they are ignoring death panels in the financial regulatory bill when they are there.” — House Financial Services Committee Chairman Barney Frank (D-Mass.),...

“The Fed utterly failed to prevent the financial crisis. Failed to prevent the housing bubble, failed to prevent the predatory lending scandal.” — Brooksley Born, former Chairman of the Commodities Futures Trading Commission, current...

“I think it will be passed in the Senate in April. I believe the president will be signing a financial reform bill before Memorial Day.” — House Financial Services Committee Chairman Barney Frank (D-Mass.), addressing a Boston Chamber of...

“Barney and I are going to work very closely together in the coming days to try and harmonize where we can our proposals. I’m confident we can get a bill. I’m very hopeful in light of our conversations over the last couple of days that we...

“Don’t let those little punk staffers take advantage of you and stand up for yourselves. All of us are hearing from our friends and constituents on lack of credit, you can’t get a loan, the more your government takes and taxes, the more...

“We may have disagreed on policy, but this will be the first disagreeable thing I’ve said to Chairman Dodd: this is a very important bill, and I cannot imagine a committee member, Republican or Democrat, passing a bill with this type of...

“We know that the banks will be regulated. If there isn’t effective regulation of the others, then it creates a competitive problem. [Banks] are instinctively looking for a relatively weak agency here, but if it ends up being a weak agency...

“Dodd is willing to be flexible, but there’s a limit to that flexibility. Both sides are going to have to learn to live with things that aren't exactly how they would have written it.” — Anonymous Senate Banking Committee staff member, as...

“I'd emphasize that the changes [in discount window terms and rate] are simply a reversal of the spread reduction we made to combat stigma and, like the closure of a number of extraordinary credit programs earlier this month, represent further...

“The refusal of large financial firms to work constructively with Congress on this effort borders on insulting to the American people who have lost so much in this crisis. From where I’m sitting, it looks like instead of investing in...

“This merger is a classic example of how the actions of our nation’s largest financial institutions led to the near-collapse of our financial system. Bank of America, through its top management, engaged in a concerted effort to deceive...

“Had it not been for Ben Bernanke in the chair of the Federal Reserve, I believe we’d be looking at a very different America today.” — Senate Banking Committee Chairman Chris Dodd (D-Conn.), urging his colleagues to vote to confirm...

“I welcome constructive input from folks in the financial sector. But what we’ve seen so far, in recent weeks, is an army of industry lobbyists from Wall Street descending on Capitol Hill to try and block basic and common-sense rules of the...

“There is an argument that says if you limit compensation too much you lose some of the best people. I don’t know where people would go for comparable salaries. There may be in some of these financial institutions people capable of playing...

“I did not run for office to be helping out a bunch of fat cat bankers on Wall Street.”— President Barack Obama, in an interview featured on the CBS News program “60 Minutes.”